You usually have a general idea of what you’ll work on during the day, that’s why GTD apps work: you schedule ahead of time what you want to get done through your day, so that you don’t forget about it. But what about the tasks that come up during the day? You know, suddenly you remember that you told someone you’d give him a call, or that you haven’t washed the car in weeks.

That’s what the app that we are reviewing today, Alarms, is useful for. It’s a simple app that lets you create quick and simple reminders without interrupting what you are doing.

A new year always brings the chance to start fresh with a new approach to staying organized, so we’re going to take a look today at PersonalBrain, a sophisticated knowledge management solution I’ve come to think of as a GPS system for my information.

PersonalBrain is unlike any other application I’ve come across for managing information. Superficially it looks somewhat like a mind mapper, and it has the ability to create networks of links among your notes like a personal wiki. But PersonalBrain is more than the sum of those parts. It always indicates what neighborhood of your information you are currently prowling.

We’ve all been there. You are relaxing at home at night, when you suddenly remember you forgot to pick up something or pay the credit card. App developers know this too, and that’s why a whole method and app category was created around Getting Things Done (GTD). And while there are plenty of GTD apps that have come out in the recent years, few are like Wunderlist.

While most developers try to find more features to saturate their apps with, Wunderlist does a great job at keeping things simple, pretty and easy. Oh, and free. Are you sold on it yet, or do we have to keep talking?

CleanHaven from Holy Mackerel Software is a tool focused on one purpose; simplifying the task of cleaning and formatting text. At first, it might seem that this need is confined to IT and data specialists, such as marketing professionals, working with lists. But there are times where occasional users would benefit from a tool that easily automates, say, formatting names and addresses in a contact list or removing duplicates.

Both the simplicity of use and the fact it is free make CleanHaven an ideal tool for this kind of use. CleanHaven has a powerful set of features available for managing text, and we’ll be taking a look at these in today’s review.

In the world of to-do lists, the golden standard comes from David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. Inside he details how to manage all of your tasks, sort them out, and accomplish them in a timely fashion. The book is so popular that it’s had multiple printings, and has become the benchmark for other organisation systems.

OmniFocus is designed to take the David Allen GTD system and make it easy to use on your Mac. The software implements the methodology to its core, making it simple to input, prioritise, and review tasks (and much more!) But OmniFocus is more than just a GTD manager—it’s a way to truly organize your life on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

We’re all busy people. Probably busier than we would like. There’s a lot going on, coming at us from all different directions. We have multiple projects and tasks going on at the same time, and sooner or later, there will come a time when you’ll need to find a solid method to keep everything in order.

Luckily for us, there’s an abundance of task management theory and methodology available—and also a lot of associated software software to choose from. Dejumble is one such task manager, and we’ll be taking it for a spin today.

Let’s be honest, there has been a flurry of activity in the task manager/list space over the last couple years. For better or worse, there seems to be an endless stream of such apps making their way to the market. Some are very complicated and almost do too much, while others are incredibly simple and cover just the basics.

Hub List is a very new piece of software that has just made an entry into this cramped space, falling very much into the latter category of a super-simple task manager. A “super early adopter beta” version has been released recently.

Beta versions—let alone “super early adopter” beta versions—can be pretty buggy, but I’ve been playing around with the software for a few days, so read on to get my first take!

Your Mac already comes loaded with three functional calculators: the actual application “Calculator”, the Dashboard calculator and the Spotlight calculator (try typing an mathematical operation into Spotlight to see what I mean). However, all three of these lack certain advanced functionality that you may need.

In this roundup we’ll go through some of the best third party widgets and applications that give you greater calculation power on your Mac, as well as a handful that are great for converting all manner of different values.

The market for task management apps seems to be one of the most active of all. There are so many variations on this theme that it’s very easy to end up spending more time on finding, setting up, and tweaking your tools than you do on actually getting things done.

It also seems that the quality of such apps is also steadily improving, as new contenders build on the success of older, more established tools, or learn from their errors or exclusions.

Today we’re considering Firetask for Mac, which promises to combine aspects of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology with more traditional systems using due dates and priorities to manage your task list.

No matter if you are coding web pages, writing lots of text, or typing out the same replies to emails constantly, I bet you’ve wished more than once for a faster way to accomplish the task of typing the same content over and over. Believe it or not, there is!

With the help of a “text expander” application, all you need to do is memorise a couple of quick abbreviations, and all this repetitive typing can be a thing of the past. Although TextExpander itself arguably holds the crown in this department, we wanted to put it to the test against some other competing software today.

Read on for our head-to-head comparison of four popular text expanding applications for OS X!